ugly bag of mostly voyager

Prologue: The Net-Girl

 

The link gave her a headache even when she’d only been connected for a single session, and she was coming off her third in a row now. Broik had insisted, and as she owed him a considerable sum of latinum, she hadn’t refused. She tugged the tiny transceiver unit out of the dataport at the base of her skull and tossed it onto her bed, slumping into the chair in front of her dressing table. Her fingers pressed circles on her aching temples and rubbed at the slightly-inflamed edges of the skin around the port. She’d just permitted herself a small sigh of exhaustion before she began disrobing for bed when she heard her Ferengi handler’s grating squawk over the commline.

 

~Róisín, you’re up. Suite 12. I’m uploading the scenario now.~

 

“Broik…” She was unable to completely suppress the groan in her voice. “I’m tired. Can’t you get another girl?”

 

~Not this time. You’ve been specifically requested.~

 

Róisín sighed. Think of the money, she told herself. “Fine. Send the parameters to my personal console. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

 

~Done. Broik out.~

 

Her terminal beeped and Róisín attached the uplink unit to it to transmit the file Broik had sent. Reading it simultaneously on her terminal screen, she felt her stomach twist painfully. She commed the Ferengi. “Broik, this is a full service flesh job! You know I don’t do those.”

 

~You go where you’re sent, honey. And this one pays big, so get dressed, put a smile on that pretty face and do as you’re told. And remember, I’ll be watching you.~

 

“Lobeless creep,” Róisín muttered under her breath as she closed the commline. It was Broik’s job to watch the fleshers to make sure the girls stayed safe, but the Ferengi took just a little too much pleasure in that part of his role. She looked again at the job specs, gritted her teeth and moved over to her closet, flicking through the limited selection until she found the outfit she needed. Breathing deeply to quell her nerves, she stepped into the short, silky blue dress and matching heels, shook out her hair, scooped up the transceiver from the bed and stomped up to Suite 12.

 

The holosuite was darkened when she entered, a few dim ceiling lamps providing the only illumination. The client hadn’t arrived yet, so Róisín glanced quickly around; Broik was notorious for leaving out critical details in the scenario files he sent his girls and she wasn’t in the mood for any surprises. It looked right, though: the bar with its row of high stools, the shadowed booths along the edges of the room, the pool table. A few holographic characters stood around, frozen in place. They were all men, Róisín noted, except for the bartender who was an amply endowed human female. Róisín wondered if her client would be disappointed by the comparison between the hologram’s figure and her own. Not that she cared.

 

She slid onto a bar stool, crossing her legs, then attached the transmitter unit to the hologrid control panel and clicked the transceiver into the dataport at the base of her skull. “Commence download,” she ordered, and closed her eyes to ward off the headache as the data streamed into her consciousness.

 

The holographic bar was located in a French port city. Her character was a woman of means, lonely after a loveless marriage and ugly divorce, driven from another solitary evening at home to seek the company of men in this slightly seedy waterfront bar. Her client was a stranger to the city who happened upon the bar, and she was supposed to seduce him.

 

Róisín’s stomach clenched a little. She tried to avoid flesh jobs as a rule and she never did anything above Level 2. As there were plenty of girls who did the fleshers, Broik was generally content to let her stick to the mind jobs. Not that she enjoyed those either – filling her mind with images from her own sexual past to provide vicarious enjoyment to nameless men was unnerving and occasionally distressing, but at least she didn’t have to touch them. And she’d become quite skilled at drawing on fantasies rather than actual memories to transmit through the link. It was so much less personal that way.

 

Róisín found it a lot harder to disassociate during the flesh jobs. As well as conjuring up memories or fantasies to heighten the experience, there was actual physical contact with the clients. The first time Broik had bullied her into a flesher she’d almost lost her job. The client had been a rotund Bolian with a body odour problem; gyrating on his lap, she’d been distracted by his pungent scent and had immediately visualised herself vomiting all over him. The mental picture had transmitted clearly through the link and the Bolian, incensed, threw her halfway across the room and demanded his credits back. She hoped her current state of exhaustion wouldn’t play such havoc with her control this time. She hoped her client wouldn’t nauseate her.

 

Behind her, the holosuite door slid open, and Róisín straightened on her stool. “Computer, begin program,” she whispered, and as the holocharacters came to life, she turned to face her client.

 

As she scrutinised the tall dark-haired man in front of her, Róisín’s stomach tightened again, but nausea had nothing to do with it. She swallowed around a suddenly dry throat and wondered if finding the client insanely attractive was actually worse for a girl like her than finding him repellent.

 

The client stepped closer. His face had been serious when he entered the holosuite, but now he gave her a slow, warm, dimpled smile that flipped her insides all over again. Unconsciously she arched her back a little, feeling the silky dress tighten over her breasts. The man’s gaze lowered past her neckline. She expected him to leer, but incomprehensibly, he blinked, flushed a little and fixed his gaze resolutely on her face.

 

“Hello,” he said in a voice like velvet. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”